Andrew Garfield, Oscar Isaac and more reveal their most daunting experiences on set
Javier Bardem and his "Dune" co-star Oscar Isaac are chatting over a Zoom call on a late October afternoon recalling the details of their work on Denis Villeneuve's retelling of the Frank Herbert novel. Bardem talks of being overwhelmed by his castmates, a generous claim that feels a little self-deprecating coming from such an established actor.
"I was there only for a very brief period of time, and mostly in the desert," he says. "I only have one set, which was when I had my encounter with Oscar, which was the most scary scene that I've ever played in my life. I had to come to a room full of really, really important, nice, very amazing actors looking at me saying, 'OK, now what?' I was like, 'F—.'"
"It was an amazing moment," Isaac adds. "It's a big entrance. These doors open and he has to walk right down the center with such swagger."
The big-budget "Dune" was just one of the films the two actors were in this year. Bardem worked with Aaron Sorkin to play Desi Arnaz in "Being the Ricardos," and Isaac was in Paul Schrader's indie "The Card Counter" as a calculating gambler with a painful past.
For Isaac, the two shoots were night and day. "It was actually about the same amount of time filming [the two] because 'The Card Counter' was 20 days. It's a tiny little movie where I'm in every scene, and yet it was about the same amount of time that I shot on 'Dune.' But with something like 'Card Counter,' you have a couple of takes. You have that location for half a day. You have to get it. Whereas with 'Dune,' it's 'Let's get that helicopter back tomorrow and do that thing again!'"
COVID-19 complicated matters for Isaac in bouncing between the two films.
"It was a real headache," the actor says, "because when the pandemic happened, we had to shut down four days before finishing on the Schrader film. This is a heartbreaker, obviously. We didn't know when we were going to get back. I knew that I had to do the 'Dune' reshoots at some point,
